Development communication as development aid for post-conflict societies

Abstract

For a couple of years now, a discussion has been going on about the role that journalists should play in so-called fragile states. According to the following understanding, the journalist should not only report on the most up-to-date, neutral, and objective events but also “educate, " “mediate, " “convince, " and thus adopt a “mediation function.” Although this function is often seen as the core responsibility of the media in the developing countries, so far hardly any differentiation has been made as to what exactly this “concept” means for journalism education and how this could be integrated into the models of journalism education. Here, this gap is to be closed by developing a competence model for academic journalism education for a fragile state, using Afghanistan as a case study. This article presents the partial results of the project “Professionalization of Academic Journalist Education in Afghanistan.”.